The big
news for me is that, after 1.5 years of work, I've sent my book proposal
out to publishers. It's called Everything Is Miscellaneous.
It'll take 2-3 weeks to find out if any want to publish it. A few
have expressed interest — good, but interest is cheap — to
my agent. Fingers crossed. (Of course, if a publisher accepts it,
I'll have to actually write the book. Hmm, I hadn't thought of that...)

In other news, I did a couple of "What's New in the Blogs?" segments
for MSNBC, but it
didn't work out. And I've been on the road way too much, mainly
talking about the topic of my potential, putative, hypothetical book.

Also, my fellowship at the Harvard Berkman Center has been renewed
for a year. Yay!

David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect conference
last month brought together a bunch of telco rebels and cultural observers
for two days of talk about how we can keep the world of Big Control from slamming
the window shut on us. I gave the wrap-up keynote. Unsure what to say, I blurted
for a continuous 20 minutes. This is something like what I said:

I'm confused. On the one hand, I'm a raving Tony
Robbins optimist. On the other hand, I'm a Lessigian
pessimist. The other day I figured out how I can contain such a contradiction.
It's very simple.

In terms of human nature, I'm sunny. I think we're fundamentally good. More
exactly, we humans are fundamentally social, and sociality is the source
of goodness. Obviously we do bad things and our circles of sympathy are
never wide enough —some sociopaths can't get past their own fingertips
—but basically we care about one another.

In terms of the unfolding of time, I'm pessimistic.
I think we're going to lose the important battles
over the Internet and there are going to be strong
controls over "private" use. The forces arrayed
against us are monumental

So, I want to invigorate Isenberg's phrase and say that the freeom to connect
is based on a right to connect. There's a big difference. Freedoms
are granted. Rights are things we can demand. And we need to be demanding
them in public places at the top of our lungs.

Rights and duties traditionally go together: if I have a right, then there's
someone I can demand it of. That isn't how it was initially, in our culture,
though, because God and kings had rights and the rest of us only saw the
duty end of the stick. But eventually we came up with the idea that we the
people were endowed with rights simply because we're we the people: life,
liberty, property, even the pursuit of happiness. And in 1948, the world,
via the United Nations, decided that maybe education, healthcare and education
might be services we have the right to demand from our governments: Freedom
of speech doesn't mean too much if flies are climbing in and out of your
kids' mouths.

Beneath the architecture of rights, though, is our insane, pervasive, ubiquitous
sociality. Rights only make sense within a social context, unless you're
Job arguing with God, and even then the fairness he was demanding had to
do with his place in the social fabric. We
have rights only because we are connected.

But what is this connection? You
know what it is. But let me point to three elements:

We're aware of others.

We care about those others.

We
can see what they see.

Obviously, not all connection
is good. People are using the Net to coordinate horrific attacks. Of
course. But connection is an a priori good, something that one needs a
special reason to refuse but not a special reason to grant. Connection
should be the default. And given how important connection is to what it
means to be human —not to mention that it underlies the accepted
human rights —connection should be a right, something we can demand.

The Japanese blogger and international
man of goodness, Joi Ito, blogged
on March 24 about a conference he was at in India:

Later, an elderly man stood up and said that all knowledge should be available
to everyone and that he didn't think we should compromise on the copyright
issues. He then said that the people are ready to fight and march in the
streets and turn over the monopolies and we didn't need to sit around and
wait for government. It turns out he used to live with Mahatma Gandhi's
at his Ashram.

I'm not saying that man has the tactics down. But
he's right that it's a good time to state what we
believe. So, here are three truths that I think are
(sort of) self-evident:

1. Free music is awesome. That doesn't mean all file-sharing is ok
or artists should work for free. Not at all. But in the debate over the
new business model, we should remember that having access to the world's
music is an unimaginable boon that should weigh heavily in the balance.

2. Rules are the exception. We resort to rules when everything fails. More
often, we manage to live together by granting each other leeway, through forgiveness,
by having a sense of humor. We should be careful not to construct our new
world by starting with rules, even if the rules are fair.

3. Anonymity is liberating. Sure, bad people do bad things under
the cloak of anonymity. But anonymity also lets dissidents escape some of
the strictures of their governments and let us all explore areas —from
health information to porn —we do not want others to know we care
about. Anonymity isn't only, or even primarily, for the guilty.

We need to speak plainly because conditions are too dire to mute our opinions.
Of course we can and will compromise, but we should not start from
compromised positions.

We need to fight the enemies of connection. If connection is a matter
of awareness, caring, and seeing, its enemies are ignorance, selfishness
and the lack of imagination. And the remedies for those are education, emotion
and art. Let's not be shy about this. (Also, it'd be good to win a freaking
election already.)

We need to stand firm because: There is no
freedom without connection. There is no peace without connection. There is
no joy without connection.

Thank you and drive carefully.

Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, my Berkman buddies, have started
a site that is turning out to be a crucial daily read for me. Called Global
Voices, it aims at getting voices from around the world heard. The daily
GV summary is indispensible.

Middle
World Resources

My goodness but the BBC is up to lots of interesting things!
I don't even know where to start. Every episode of every program is
getting its own URL and will be intensely metadated. An experiment
lets you phone in to bookmark songs you hear on the radio. They're
putting RSS all over the place. They're handing out video cameras to
people who can't afford them and posting the results. The BBC is showing
us what mainstream media might be like if its mandate were simply to
make our lives better.

I'm not smart enough to figure out how to send a multi-page fax by
scanning in paper using Windows XP's fax function. I can send
them one at a time, but I don't really want to make a separate call
for each page. There's got to be a better way!

There is. It's called MightyFax —be sure to pick up the multi-page fax scanner attachment —and it'll
cost you $20. It's not elegant, but it works.

I just finished Half Life 2, the greatest video game in history.
At least in its genre. The graphics are not only technically astounding,
they're well-drawn. The characters are all stock but pretty well acted,
which puts it above most Bruce Willis movies. The physics are phenomenal;
in fact, I wish someone would use it to create a physics simulator for
students to play with. But what makes it so much fun is that it's
consistently imaginative and inventive.

It is more fun than the type of movie it emulates. Those lines have
crossed.

I've been reading Steve's stuff for some time now and I think
I've discovered what makes his writing style so good: He thinks well. He
turns corners and pulls you with him. It's the kind of unexpected unfolding
that makes narratives work, but Steve does it purely in the realm of ideas.
He writes so well because he's so damn smart. (Also, he just writes so damn
well.)

This short new book has a strong and simple premise: Pop culture is making
us smarter. The bulk of the book argues that pop culture is more complex
than it used to be and more than we usually give it credit for. Look past
the content of video games and TV, Steve says, and you'll see that their
structures are far more complicated and demanding than ever before. (Deadwood should
be his new favorite example.) He graphs the complexity of social relationships
in Dynasty and 24, for example, and shows that the former
is like a family while the latter is like a village. In following 24,
we get better at understanding complex social relationships. He compares Hill
Street Blues, the first mainstream multi-storyline prime-time show,
with
Starsky and Hutch before it and The Sopranos after it. There
is no doubt: We've gotten far better at parsing interwoven plot lines and
making sense of plots that aren't laid out for us like mackerels. Likewise,
video games, he says, have gotten a bad rap because of their content, while
once again their structure has been ignored. They teach us how to make decisions
in complex environments, he says. Steve's quite wonderful at analyzing precisely
the ways in which games, tv shows, and, to a lesser degree, movies demand
more from us than before — his examples of "multiple threading, flashing
arrows, and social networks," for example, are so
insightful that they're funny..

There's no doubt in my mind that Steve is right that pop culture is more
complex than before. But does that complexity make us smarter? Here he gets
more speculative, suggesting that the rise in the average IQ might well be
correlated with the way our culture is training us to be more actively intelligent.
The causality is hard to prove, and Steve proceeds properly tentatively.
We certainly have gotten smarter at following entertainments. Does that mean
that we've gotten smarter outside of watching TV and playing video games?
Or are we only better at following the new rules of TV narrative and video
play? Common sense and intuition make me think that Steve is right: The complexifying
of pop culture is making us smarter. But then I look at the election results
and wonder. We seem more impatient with nuance than ever before in the political
realm. Is pop culture training us to be smarter about anything except pop
culture?

So, if it's a persuasive essay, am I persuaded?

1. That pop culture is getting more complex and requires more involvement
to understand? 100%.

2. That this is making us smarter outside of pop culture? I lean that way
but I'm not 100% convinced. Steve acknowledges the difficulty of proving either
the fact or the causality.

3. That we should be more positive about pop culture? Definitely. Even so,
I think Steve occasionally underplays the value of the old media that competes
for our time. Although he's careful to say that he is not claiming books have
less value than games and TV, I think for rhetorical purposes he doesn't give
books their due. Despite an hilarious few pages about how books would look
if video games had come first, books do something that video games, TV, theater
and films don't do very well: Show us the world as it appears to someone else.
Those media let us view how people different from us act in the world
as it appears to them, but only in books do we actually live in that
world. This, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, has moral value. Steve refers
to this quality of books briefly at the end, but it struck me as ass-covering.
And he he misses the opportunity to talk about it while developing his argument.
For example, in Part One he writes:

Most video games take place in worlds that are deliberately
fanciful in nature, and even the most realistic games can't compare to
the vivid, detailed illusion of reality that novels or movies concoct for
us. But our lives are not stories, at least in the present tense - we don't
passively consume a narrative thread....Traditional narratives have much
to teach us, of course: they can enhance our powers of communication, and
our insight into the human psyche. But if you were designing a cultural
form explicitly to train the cognitive muscles of the brain..." (p. 58
of the non-final bound galleys)

To my mind, that underplays the value of books and narratives.
Great novels reveal a world; calling that an "illusion" denigrates their
ability to show the truth.

And, to my way of thinking, the most important lesson
of narratives isn't that they give insight into our psyches or teach us
how to communicate. Instead, narratives show us that events
unfold: The end was contained in the beginning but not in a way that we could
have predicted. Narrative is about ambiguity and emergence, as Steve,
the Brown-educated, lit-crit scholar and author of Emergence -
buy it today! - knows. Had he kept that aspect of books in mind during
the section on video games, for example, his point about the complex hierarchy
of aims in the game Zelda would have been less convincing. Sure,
we make decisions in games based on a nested stack of goals, and we learn
the rules of the virtual worlds we're exploring. But those goals and
rules are ultimately knowable and completely expressible. Although Half
Life 2 is, as Steve points out, far more complex than the previous generation's
Pac-Man, for all its amazing physics and integrated puzzles and pretty
good pixelated acting, HL2 gives us a toy world. The world of Emma Bovary,
on the other hand, doesn't resolve to rules and puzzles. It's messy,
ambiguous, and truly complex. Of course Steve knows this, but he underplays
it when pointing out the hidden complexity of video games.

Steve is not asking us to decide between books and contemporary pop
culture. He obviously loves books. He defends pop culture by pointing
out values in its structure that we've missed as we've focused on its often-offensive
content. And this he does brillliantly. And entertainingly. This book is
so much fun to read. All I'm saying is that in making his case, he undervalues
one aspect of the old culture, which might otherwise have taken just a couple
of lumens off the buff-job he's done on the new one.

But let me be unambiguous in my recommendation: Read this book. It will
change the way you view pop culture. And you will enjoy every page and every
surprising turn of thought.

Steve this morning replied to some of his reviewers, including me. I've
replied to his reply here.

Disclosure: The book comes out May 5. Steve sent me bound galleys because
we bonded at a conference last year. I was a major fan of his well before that.

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